SemiSerious

If you just crawled out from under a rock or you were too busy filling orders for Saskatchewan sealskin bindings, you may not have heard about Apple’s iPhone launch last Friday. Fortunately, we did, and our crack marketing team stood in a Boston Apple Store line for 12 hours, raced back to HQ here in Ottawa, and promptly smashed the poor thing to bits. The result was the revelation of the secret inner hardware in a tasteful video.

As many reviews including our own have pointed out, there was nothing earth-shaking discovered on the high-level IC parts list. But exploring the nether regions of integrated circuits is our business, and we have discovered one interesting device so far. The EDGE radio module contains an innovative product from Peregrine Semiconductor. This device is an SP4T switch for use in the RF path of a radio (cell phone) to switch between transmit and receive circuit connections to the single antenna. It is based on what Peregrine has trademarked as UltraCMOS. This technology is silicon-based. It is a subset of silicon-on-insulator, but does not use the oxide of silicon for the insulator as we often see in typical SOI devices. For this high performance application, UltraCMOS uses a sapphire substrate as the platform for adding silicon transistors. What you get is silicon-on-saphhire or S-O-S.

Peregrine’s UltraCMOS device is very interesting. The iPhone is the first consumer product we have pulled one out of. Peregrine’s technology is the only silicon-based circuit for this application. Its competitors are complex III-V and derivative compounds patterned as p-HEMTs and other such beasts. (Check my last post for some background on III-V’s.)

Despite the undeniable cool factor of the iPhone and the Peregrine UltraCMOS, the real news here is that our world-leading SCM team has produced 2D carrier concentration profiles of this type of device for the first time. Acquiring two-dimensional carrier profiles by SCM is a daunting task for any type of SOI device. However, it proved to be no obstacle for my amazing colleague, Dr. Jochonia Nxumalo. You can see some CMOS devices at the left and the Peregrine die markings in the SCM image at the top of this post.

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